Event recap: Thornlie October 2016

Event recap: Thornlie October 2016

Our October Thornlie event was a great success as usual. Here are some recollections from amongst the games played:

Lorenzo il Magnifico

Ian and I tried this one out. It’s from the designers of Grand Austria Hotel and Marco Polo.

It ultimately takes the best from both of those games, using a dice pool to represent the values of the pawns that each player has. The pawn (dice) placement becomes symmetric for players and the focus is on building your engine to generate resources and buying up end of game scoring bonuses.

There’s a really nice stress mechanic where you need to gain the favour of the church or face excommunication. This track gets harder and harder to satisfy throughout the 3 “ages” of the game and it’s pretty well inevitable that you’re going to get excommunicated at least once. The penalties for failing on this track are very harsh, and the ways of gaining the churches favour are relatively scarce. It brings a nice bit of tension to the game.

Ian cleaned up with lots of set bonuses and an early run on resource production to fuel his end game streak.

It’s possibly not at its best at 2 and both Ian and I are keen to check it out as a 3 or 4 player game.

 

Terraforming Mars

Myself, Mark, Pete and Ben played one of the 3 games I saw of this happening.

Fill Mars with oceans and forests in an attempt to raise the temperature and create enough oxygen for a livable surface, with the occasional comet smashing into someone else city. Mechanically it’s quite easy to learn but the depth comes in the amount of cards available during the game.

Some reviews have mentioned it can be quite mean but the few cards we came across that removed an opponents resources weren’t that bad at all. You’d have to be a real care bear to let that bother you.

That’s one Mars game down this year, only 627 to go.

 

Lotus

A simple but pretty game, about placing flower petals to make flowers.

You each have a deck of cards in your colour that have your control markers on them. As you place a petal to the relevant flower you’re adding 1 or 2 control markers to that flower. When the flower is completed you evaluate who had the most control markers, and that person gets a bonus power, or 5 bonus VPs. Then the person who completed the flower gets all of the petal cards which are worth 1 VP at the end of the game.

As there are flowers with 3 petals and flowers with 7 petals, you get an interesting dynamic where sometimes you’ll finish a flow just to get the 5, 6 or 7 cards even though the other player will still hold the majority.

It’s very light, but as far as fillers go this one was good fun.

 

Lisboa

Steven joined Ian and I for a playtest of Lisboa.

The rules took a while with, lots of front-loaded information but ultimately the actions you can take are really quite simple. Fundamentally on your turn you can take 1 of 3 actions, and those actions have 1-3 optional sub-actions associated with them. The board is pretty dynamic so when you take certain actions you might cause the treasury to improve or decline, you might cause the price of goods to decline and so on.

Ultimately it’s an efficiency game. Using your semi-random hand of cards (you draw them from face up decks) how best can you put those actions to use to get the best result. There’s some forward planning in how you rebuild Lisboa and how the civic buildings that you use to score those building will get played in future turns. There’s a lot of possible consequences to your actions such as inadvertently (or as we might have exclaimed defensively, “strategically”) giving your opponents VPs, resources or some other benefit.

It’s a seriously heavy game and we were all pretty fried at the end of it. I honestly can’t decide how much I liked it but I would happily tackle it again to help make up my mind.

It doesn’t hurt that I won this one with a lot of end game scoring bonuses 🙂

 

Imperial Assault

Continuing the core campaign that myself, Mark, Pete, Rowland and occasionally Jason (but not this time) have been working through for the past few months.

Myself as the Imperials hadn’t had a win for a couple games and I was starting to feel like the Rebels might overwhelm me in the final stretch. Fortunately I forced a mission upon them that played much in my favour and I walloped them also picking up an awesome ability in the process. 4 missions to go until the finale.

Every play of this makes me cringe a little less at Episode II because that gave us the awesome Nexu beast which I will use at every opportunity.

 

Powerboats

It’s been ages since I’ve played this. Rowland taught Pete and I then proceeded to leave us in his spray. Quick, fun, easy to learn. Could do with another player or 2 but isn’t bad with only 3.

 

Hawaii

Started with a 5 player game of Hawaii with Adrian, Tim, Rob, Dave and myself. I taught and was ecstatic to play this somewhere other than yucata. I really enjoy the worker placement mechanics in this game including the fact that there may be a different cost to do the same action every turn. I feel like I won this game (it is one of my all time favourites) but perhaps that means I need to teach better 😛

 

El Grande

First up Warren taught this to Grug, Nick, Steve and myself. THANK YOU!!

Can very easily see why this game is so highly ranked on BGG. Having played mainly 2 player online this 5 player game was very different for me. So much to think about when playing this, what power card to bid, which action card do I want to play(or not play), what are my opponents most likely wanting to do… really like that it gives my brain a workout. Need to play more!
Warren of course won the game but only by one point ahead of Nick.